Focus on: LU siblings take part in family laser engraving business| Wholesale & Retail Laser Engraving/Etching Machine| us.hanslaser.net

Austin and Casey Olson, the youngest brains behind Against the Grain Laser at 21 and 19 respectively, describe themselves as “third culture kids” — he was born on a military base in Germany while she was born in Phoenix.
They lived in several locations, including Nevada, Colorado and Tucson, Arizona, while their father served in the Air Force for 26 years. Before moving to Lynchburg in the summer of 2014, the Olsons lived in Oahu, Hawaii, for six years, a place the two now claim as their home when people ask where they’re from.
At 16, Austin started working in a military woodshop on the island, after three years of woodshop class.
But his interest in woodworking started much earlier, when he began using his father’s power tools to whittle in Arizona. Casey recalls him running around in the backyard with wooden “Lord of the Rings” swords he’d whittled himself.
The shop in Hawaii also had a laser engraver, and Austin became accustomed to working on it.
He started making gifts for friends and family and eventually made his father a shadow box to mark his retirement from the military. The bottom of the box is modeled after the symbol of the Air Force, two stylized wings that connect to a star with a sphere at its center.
“When I pitched the idea that we should be an engraving business … I think I really sold that to him just with the shadow box I made him and him just seeing my work that we would make for people,” Austin says.
The family purchased the engraver in Nevada, a stop on their two-month road trip from Hawaii to Lynchburg, and had it shipped ahead to Virginia.
“To get it into the house, we actually had to carve the door out of the basement,” he says. “I’m sure that was expensive … having to put [in] a new door. They had to cut through the brick.”
The laser engraver became the starting point for the Olson family woodshop — located on the bottom floor of their home, connected to Austin’s room of hand-built furniture — as well as the launching point for their engraving company in Lynchburg.
They considered using the name Grafted before landing on Against the Grain Laser.
“Because the hope is we’re going to do business that goes against the norm,” Casey says. “We want our customers to go against the normal flow of society and basically just be Christ-like in everything in a culture that’s very hostile toward that.”
The family-run business builds plaques designed by both Casey and other Liberty University students.
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